Dana Blankenhorn

White Lives Matter

That’s a pretty nasty headline, isn’t it?

All lives matter. Obviously.

A friend was offended, however, when she saw demonstrators recently chanting “Black Lives Matter.” She made the same point as above. All lives matter, she said.

I lit into her, but good.

Of course, all lives should matter. But black lives still don’t. There is abundant evidence to that effect, far too much to recount here.

I have written several times in the last decade that we’re now in a “fourth riding of the KKK,”  and events have borne that out. That’s how history will record our time.

Hillary’s Burden

The Presidents whose elections validate what I call a generation’s political Thesis – a set of assumptions about myths and values that create power – have a very poor record in office.

Just look at the list.

George H.W. Bush. Harry Truman. William Howard Taft. U.S. Grant. Martin Van Buren. James Madison. They moved smoothly into power by validating the beliefs of crisis leaders. Nixon and Reagan. FDR. McKinley and Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln. Andrew Jackson. Thomas Jefferson.

This is the spot in my children’s political lives Hillary Clinton seeks to fill. Not my life, my children’s lives. History says it’s a very bad spot to hold. But her task is made more difficult by her own long political history.

The End of the War

As of December, the U.S. will have been in a state of perpetual war for 75 years.  We have been in a low-grade Civil War for about two-thirds of that time.

We committed to this course in 1968, when America elected Richard Nixon on just such a platform. Order at home, American order abroad. Vietnam was a Cold War activity, and even before it ended we had started another one, in Afghanistan, a war that even a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama, has found unable to end “with honor.”

Peace with honor, to Americans, means peace with a promise by the other side not to attack us again. We left Vietnam, the North took over, but they have kept that promise and we have no problems with them today. Afghans won’t make that promise. They never have, they never will. So that war goes on.

What of the war back home? That war seemed to end in the 1970s, but it never really did. It remained a low-grade conflict under many names, the most common being The War on Drugs. The name of the drug changed, but the battlefield never did. It was poor people, brown people, often Hispanic people that generations learned to fight, hate and fear.

In 1864 the Civil War seemed intractable. It had been hiding under the tables when the Constitution was written. Slavery’s hands are all over the document. So that war had been going on, with increasing intensity, for a lifetime by 1864’s battles. That was to be war’s bloodiest year, and the outcome wasn’t certain until the November re-election of Abraham Lincoln. That result was made certain by some of the bloodiest battles of the war, especially one that destroyed my own home, Atlanta, and which is still remembered with an annual celebration that is taking place now.

In 2016 the Second Civil War also seems intractable. So, too, the foreign war. But as in 2016 we may be closer to the end of both than we realize.

Final Warning

I have said before that America is a fortunate country.

The so-called United Kingdom is proving that right now.

The Brexit vote is a warning. It shows what can happen if income inequality becomes too large, and leads people to believe in demagogues.

The same trends that caused this catastrophe are alive in our own country. They were alive in the Bernie Sanders campaign, whose British analog is Jeremy Corbyn. They were alive in the Brexit campaign, the American analog being Donald Trump.

The Downside of Tech’s Dominance

Back when I was at Rice, 40 years ago, oil was a fairly benign political force. Or so it seemed to me, lost in my studies, surrounded by oil money, which was rapidly building the huge Texas Medical Center before my very eyes.

We know different now. We know how power corrupts every industry, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. We saw that with George W. Bush, the spoiled son of an oilman, installed in power by a Supreme Court created through political action, unelected by the people. Since then we’ve seen Iraq, we’ve seen Katrina, we’ve seen the Great Recession. We’re seeing climate change, threatening the whole human race.

Worse, we’ve seen D.C. vs. Heller, idiots thinking Thomas Jefferson wants them to own AR-15s as some natural right. We’ve seen Citizens United, billionaires who think they have an absolute right to control us with their dollars, simply because they have them. These last injuries will abide. They are examples of how the oil industry, which took political power only to be left alone in the 1960s, eventually abused it to the detriment of the whole world.

Just as railroads pushed farmers and working people too far in the 19^th century, and utilities collapsed the economy in the 1920s, just as manufacturers used political power to go to Vietnam in the 1960s, so oil eventually became a noisome element in the national political equation, and was overthrown by technology in 2008.